How we work. How we work. The design principles inside all eleven AlgoVend strategy families.
Ask a new trader how they plan to improve a losing strategy and they will almost always swap one entry indicator for another: replace RSI with Stochastic, change a twenty-day average to a fourteen-day, or add a third line to the chart. Ask someone who runs rules for a living and you get a different answer. Most entry signals are doing roughly the same job. What separates a durable rule from a fragile one is knowing when to turn the entry signal off.
Every strategy family has one kind of market it was built for and another kind that Chews it up. Trend rules make their year in long, steady directional moves and bleed slowly in sideways chop. Option sellers collect steady income in quiet weeks and give it back when volatility explodes. Mean reversion works when dips are temporary scares and hurts when a real bear market begins.
Three gates that sit in front of the signal
- The index regime switch. In a broad market sell-off, individual stock charts stop behaving independently—almost all large companies fall together. Our Market Mode family and the conservative Swing Mean Reversion preset check where the index or the stock sits against its 200-day average before risking a rupee.
- The trend-strength floor. A moving average crossover or a Supertrend flip happens even when a stock is drifting sideways in a narrow band. Adding an ADX threshold asks whether price is actually travelling anywhere before acting on the flip.
- The implied-volatility percentile floor. Selling an Iron Condor or a Short Strangle when options are near their cheapest level of the past year pays pennies for taking the same tail risk. Checking that implied volatility sits above its 25th or 40th percentile ensures the rule only sells insurance when insurance is expensive.
Sizing by what can go wrong, not what you hope to make
The second habit that separates systematic rules from retail trading is how many shares they buy. A retail trader usually picks a round number of shares or puts a fixed chunk of cash into every trade. If one stock has a tight six percent stop and another needs a wide fifteen percent stop, the second trade can hurt the account two-and-a-half times as badly as the first.
In our positional stock strategies, sizing works backwards from the stop. You set the fraction of the account you are willing to lose if the stop is hit—say one percent—and the engine calculates the quantity from the distance between the entry price and the stop. A wider stop automatically buys a smaller position, so every mistake costs the same known share of equity.
You cannot control whether the next breakout works. You can control, to the rupee, what a failed one costs the account.
Separating the signal from the risk engine
On AlgoVend, a strategy only emits a signal; a central execution engine converts that signal into a sized, risk-checked order. Even if a rule fires, the engine checks position concentration caps, daily loss limits, and market hours before anything reaches a broker. And because you can open any of our eleven strategy families in the builder, you can see—and adjust—both the regime filter and the risk budget in plain words.
If you take one thing away
The secret to systematic trading is not a hidden indicator. It is gating every strategy behind the market regime it was built for, and sizing every position so a hit stop costs a fixed, survivable fraction of the account.
Every strategy family on AlgoVend can be opened as a plain-English Rule Sheet, edited without code, and tested with real brokerage.
Open the strategy builder